The 1- to 5-fish bag limit recommendation of the Marine Resource Committee modified to include closure.
SACRAMENTO – During the California Fish and Game Commission’s (Commission )meeting Wednesday December 10 Item 5 was to consider publishing the Intent to modify the sand bass limit for 2025. This is the first of a 3-part process for modifying regulations. It will be followed by a Discussion Hearing on the subject at their next meeting in February, then a Decision Hearing in April. The outcome of these will be new bag limits that will come into effect June 1 of 2025, as currently scheduled. The recommendation from the Marine Resource Committee was to include a range of options from no action – continued 5-barred sand bass within the combined 5-fish bass limit for spotted and barred sand bass plus calico bass – to 1 barred sand bass (BSB) per angler per day within the 5-fish combined bass bag limit.
However, a couple of influential written public comments from marine biologists had come in since then, both recommending closing the sand bass season during the summer months when by far the greatest numbers of BSB are caught by recreational anglers.
FGC Commissioners on the MRC, Samantha Murray and Eric Sklar had strongly considered including the zero-bag-limit in their MRC recommendation, but had ultimately decided against it late in the conversation. A closed summer season would pre-empt the flow of data biologists depend on to understand the stock’s abundance. It would also preclude tag recovery information during those summer months.
The Sportfishing Association (SAC) proposes to tag BSB all along the coastline, far down into Mexican waters where the core of the BSB population is.
While current scientific information assumes local sand bass abundance is the result of local area spawning and growth, the skippers that have followed sand bass for decades think the large swings in sand bass catches over the years are the result of them coming up from southern waters en-mass as do barracuda and bonito.
The full Commission also heard public testimony from several skippers and landing owners, including SAC President Ken Franke, this writer, Donna Kalez from Dana Wharf Sportfishing, Capt. Aaron Graham of the Native Sun out of 22nd Street Landing, Capt. Fred Huber with the Daily Double and Point Loma in San Diego who traveled to Sacramento for the meeting. Several others called in including Jaime Diamond at Santa Barbara Landing.
These constituents testified in support of keeping the BSB season open during the summer months and doing the scientific work to fully understand where sand bass come from and how many there are via a stock assessment.
Mr. Greg Helms of the Environmental NGO Ocean Conservancy supported closing the sand bass season during the summer however it was unclear how sand bass were important to his constituency.
Fish-on representative Anupa Asokan was also supportive of the more restrictive measure. That organization presents itself as representing anglers. Yet a deeper look shows it to be supported financially by the Earth Island Institute. It’s an “environmental activist” organization of the ilk that typically opposes the taking of wildlife resources by individuals.
As discussion of the range of alternatives came before the full Commission, President Murray mentioned the powerful letters they received advocating a summertime closure, in the context of modifying the MRC’s earlier choice to exclude a zero bag limit summer season from further consideration. Fellow MRC Commissioner Sklar appeared to concur.
Commissioner Erika Zavaleta voiced strong support for closing the sand bass season over summer and forwarded that as the only option for consideration.
After some further discussion by the Commission with staff regarding their options moving forward the Commission declined Commissioner Zavaleta’s proposal. They chose to support continued consideration of a range of options, from zero BSB to 5 BSB bag limits with the option to have different bag limits between the summer months and the rest of the year.
The thrust of the consideration was reducing the bag limit during the summer when they bite best and most of the catch comes in. The final vote was 4 in favor, with Zavaleta voting no – making a statement that she preferred the proposed action to be a zero bag limit, or closed season on sand bass during the summer.
The Department of Fish and Wildlife’s recommended action has been a year-round 4-fish bag limit on BSB for the next 3 years. SAC representatives would support that, however the sense was there wasn’t a big problem with sand bass, as their numbers have always varied greatly from year to year and decade to decade.
The current low catch levels seen since 2010 are not unusual in the long-term perspective and catches have historically surged back from low numbers under regulations that were much more liberal – 12-inch size limit and 10-fish bag limit from 1971 to 2013 – over 40 years.
In 1979 sand bass landings were less than 300 thousand for the year. In 2000 catches peaked at over 700 thousand per year and held over 600 thousand through about 2005. Between 1979 and 2005 catch levels swung wildly jumping up and down by as much as 300 thousand in just a couple of years.
But by 2012 the annual catch was down to around just 150 thousand. In 2013 the bag limit was reduced to 5 fish and minimum size limit increased to 14 inches.
Predictably the catch fell further – to around just 75 thousand by 2016. Since then it’s gradually increased, with 200 thousand 14-inch-plus fish landed in 2023. However the numbers of fish greater than the old 12-inch limit but less than 14 that were released would have likely pushed that number much higher, into the 300 to 400 thousand fish range.
Fish and Wildlife biologists using SCUBA gear have counted and sized sand bass for 6 years starting in 2017, with 2020 missed due to COVID. Their results indicate fewer smaller sand bass in the mix last year than when they started in 2017. Much like in our fishery, the dive surveys don’t typically see the full complement of sand bass less than 8 inches.
Most of the scientific papers on BSB have a different foundational perspective than the skippers that fished them over the past decades. These skippers see the big years as a result of sand bass migrating north from their core population south of the border.
However, the current science starts with the largely untested premise that most or all sand bass caught in SoCal are a locally grown resource – even in the big years of the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Thus the recent low catches speak to a local resource in need of a high level of conservation.
What has been tested to some degree is how large local BSB home ranges typically are, and it’s not large. A research project tagged about 50 BSB at Palos Verdes reefs with acoustic transponders and a few of these were tracked out on the Long Beach Shelf during the following summer.